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The Coming of the Conversationalists

Over on the Groundswell blog this week the published an interesting post with a much more interesting graphic based on an update of their ‘Social Technographics‘ work that Forrester use in their consultative work and if I remember rightly was featured in the Groundswell book (which I’ll admit I’ve never finished..)

I’ve added the graphic below and the big change was the addition of ‘Conversationalists’ to the ladder. These people are defined as

..not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.

I like this addition as it reflects my experience of the social web much more. Unlike many of my colleagues I am still a regular user of Facebook and have watched it change to a much more conversational platform over the last year or so and Twitter, for me at least, has also become much less about broadcast and more about conversation (though that may well have more to do with my new ‘follow’ and ‘block’ on Twitter than anything else!) Most of my friends on Facebook wouldn’t see what they were doing as contributing to the social web and almost exclusively find Twitter ‘weird’ – yet they increasingly use Facebook in much the same way as I use Twitter.

To be clear while I like the terms in this ladder (though I appear to cross-over into an awful lot of them) I do not recognise the figures used at all. The idea that only 17% of people aren’t regularly using the social web (with regular being monthly or weekly for this purpose apparently) seems very low if it was mapped against the UK but that is just a gut feeling and I could be wrong.